Your sculpts seem to make your model look worse than what you've done with standard poly modeling, i'de say either practice sculpting stuff way more before using it on a serious project or just do it all with sub-ds in silo.
Im gonna have to agree with eq. It seems like when you sculpt youre just going at it without really thinking about what you want the final product to look like. What comes out is a very random, and often, very muddy looking sculpt.
Your second face was a large improvement, but youre lacking in all areas of subtlety. What should be little wrinkles become huge bulges and so on. I suggest you start over one more time and turn down the power of your brush a LOt. Then just kinda slowly build it up, because it looks pretty rushed right now.
The pants have a similar problem, but I think what would help you the most is if you copied the folds off a reference from somewhere. While some of the folds are lookin good, others just look completely random.
Lastly, you have a lot of bumpy muddiness in your sculpts. Smooth it out a bit for some cleaner curves.
Im really loving all your poly modeling though and the char is pretty tight. Keep on workin at it
Aye, it does look blobby - mainly because I build it it up in layers on a small area - sculpt in huge sections, then refine, repeat.
Reference? Copying? Yup, thats exactly what I'm doing. You might be surprised in how cloth actually does fold and hang at times. Those legs are a copy off the loose combats I was wearing last night, plus 3d.sk reference.
wow , the second head is a massive improvment, I dont think its worth trying to sculpt in the really high frequency details, but a few smaller details around the wrinkles might help a little and a little more structure to the ear area.
Legs are coming on , and just like the head i know next time you post its gonna be massivly improved as you refine the shapes.
All UV'd, came in at 5850 or so - trimmed a few polies out, added more in in the guise of extra details - pouches, dagger holster, another collar, some straps, cannisters etc.
Got a few minor mesh proportions to finalise, but I think I'll bake my normal maps first - no point in having to deform the high poly.
So I've laid down base colours for the texture - one huge 2048, which hurt me. Normally I'd break that up into smaller textures for a game - fleshy arts, uniform parts, armour parts etc, so that they could all be swapped out. I'd put all the alphas onto one sheet so that only that one would need an alpha channel (hey kids, listen to uncle Rick! Smaller images with alphas = smaller overhead). Fuck it, it's not going into a game.
Base and weapons for the next few evenings if I'm not in work (was again tonight). Rigging and posing at work of course.
looking good man. I look forward to seeing this done and ready for action!
one question if i may:
what do u mean by 'smaller overhead'?... just trying to familiarise myself with a new term.
Smaller memory overhead. You image needs an extra channel, so it's about 30% larger to store. A 512x512 TGA with no alpha is about 750k uncompressed, and with an alpha channel its about 1MB. Even if you convert to dxt compression, you still need to store that alpha channel on disk and in memory.
I believe a 2048x2048 texture is about 12MB on disk (it's early, I'm still sleeping). You add an alpha channel to that and it becomes 16MB.
However, if you split the texture into 4 textures, each at 1024, and put all your alphas on one one those sheets, your diffuse textures still come out at 12Mb in total, but only 3mb each. Adding the alpha to that one sheet only adds 33% of 3MB = 1MB, so your total space is 13MB instead of 16MB.
Of course, those numbers are wrong because you'll likely use .dds instead of .tga, but the theory is still there.
A few other boring tech maths things - dds compression of normal maps is weak, so many people shuffle them - drop the blue, shift the red channel to the alpha. You end up storing an alpha for your normal maps. You can save space again but putting other information into those unused blue and red channels - like a B&W specular map.
You can do it! You're ahead of me atleast...
I like the pose, the texture could use a bit more love but I'm sure you'd give it that love if you had the time.
Gogogogogogogo!
Managed to get it submitted -not that it mattered. This is so unfinished that I'm embarrassed.
It needs another week of work at least. I never tied down a concept early on, and spent too much time noodling in the midpoly range.
I wasted too much time on a base that you never see.
The renders are poorly lit. Gah it's like a series of test shots. He looks like he is floating, but he ain't.
I'm also bloody sick of it, but I like the character. It was a good test of Silos highpoly tools when I finally used them, and it helped me put workflow recommendations in for Silo as a package.
Oh, and I found a skinning bug in max 9 tonight where certain verts were weighted as -1#.10. It made skinning some areas an utter chore - Thermidor had a damn good run at it for me. In the end, I discovered that I could fix each of those verts by going to the weight table and shift+right clicking on those -# numbers. This killed them
I dropped the sniper rifle from his back simply because I ran out of time to texture it.
I do like his alpha collar.
I do like the colour choices, which changed recently. I like that his white shirt has contrast between his skin and the jacket, and that I did the same with the legs, shins and feet. Originally the skin was lighter and the shins were dark, and everything got a little lost.
Finally, I did have 2 good excuses for losing time. One is the 29th of March, and the other is the 18th April.
Considering how busy you have been im very suprised you finished in time Rick. Its looking real nice , shame you didnt have time in the very end to put that extra polish. Things like the low poly revolver. You dont really need to be to be told where you went wrong , i know you can see any problemed areas yourself.
The final result is looking cool, but not as cool as it could have.
Well done for finnishing it in time. I didnt even get past concepting.
Replies
Made a start on the legs tonight, with a minor bit of redesign on them at the knees.
Horrible compression - must look into the Silo jpg screenshot options.
Your second face was a large improvement, but youre lacking in all areas of subtlety. What should be little wrinkles become huge bulges and so on. I suggest you start over one more time and turn down the power of your brush a LOt. Then just kinda slowly build it up, because it looks pretty rushed right now.
The pants have a similar problem, but I think what would help you the most is if you copied the folds off a reference from somewhere. While some of the folds are lookin good, others just look completely random.
Lastly, you have a lot of bumpy muddiness in your sculpts. Smooth it out a bit for some cleaner curves.
Im really loving all your poly modeling though and the char is pretty tight. Keep on workin at it
Reference? Copying? Yup, thats exactly what I'm doing. You might be surprised in how cloth actually does fold and hang at times. Those legs are a copy off the loose combats I was wearing last night, plus 3d.sk reference.
Legs are coming on , and just like the head i know next time you post its gonna be massivly improved as you refine the shapes.
Keep going!
Alex
Silo 2 top tip
pasted from 2d
Apologies if everyone knows this already...but this had to be shared.
I'm using Silo 2.
I was creating a low poly mesh from a high poly sculpt. Target model was around 1200 polygons (triangles), source was 300,000 or so.
I cloned the highpoly, and removed levels of sub-d from it to give me a low poly base to work from - I think it was around 3000 quads.
Anyway, after cutting out the details, I was using surface snapping and tweak mode to snap the low poly close to the high poly. Still quite a process.
Then it hit me.
Surface snapping, symmetry enabled smooth brush.
The lowpoly model basically just melted over the high. I brushed and massaged a low poly mesh around a high one.
Utterly stunning.
Highpoly built.
Low poly built (will get tweaks after normal maps baked)
All low poly bits mapped in their individual files.
To to - proper UV layout.
Bake normal maps
Textures.
Rig
Pose
Weapons
Base.
All UV'd, came in at 5850 or so - trimmed a few polies out, added more in in the guise of extra details - pouches, dagger holster, another collar, some straps, cannisters etc.
Got a few minor mesh proportions to finalise, but I think I'll bake my normal maps first - no point in having to deform the high poly.
So I've laid down base colours for the texture - one huge 2048, which hurt me. Normally I'd break that up into smaller textures for a game - fleshy arts, uniform parts, armour parts etc, so that they could all be swapped out. I'd put all the alphas onto one sheet so that only that one would need an alpha channel (hey kids, listen to uncle Rick! Smaller images with alphas = smaller overhead). Fuck it, it's not going into a game.
Base and weapons for the next few evenings if I'm not in work (was again tonight). Rigging and posing at work of course.
http://www.terrainosaur.com/terrain.php
Steal steal.
one question if i may:
what do u mean by 'smaller overhead'?... just trying to familiarise myself with a new term.
good luck!
I believe a 2048x2048 texture is about 12MB on disk (it's early, I'm still sleeping). You add an alpha channel to that and it becomes 16MB.
However, if you split the texture into 4 textures, each at 1024, and put all your alphas on one one those sheets, your diffuse textures still come out at 12Mb in total, but only 3mb each. Adding the alpha to that one sheet only adds 33% of 3MB = 1MB, so your total space is 13MB instead of 16MB.
Of course, those numbers are wrong because you'll likely use .dds instead of .tga, but the theory is still there.
A few other boring tech maths things - dds compression of normal maps is weak, so many people shuffle them - drop the blue, shift the red channel to the alpha. You end up storing an alpha for your normal maps. You can save space again but putting other information into those unused blue and red channels - like a B&W specular map.
thanks again. and 'good luck' again.
I like the pose, the texture could use a bit more love but I'm sure you'd give it that love if you had the time.
Gogogogogogogo!
It needs another week of work at least. I never tied down a concept early on, and spent too much time noodling in the midpoly range.
I wasted too much time on a base that you never see.
The renders are poorly lit. Gah it's like a series of test shots. He looks like he is floating, but he ain't.
I'm also bloody sick of it, but I like the character. It was a good test of Silos highpoly tools when I finally used them, and it helped me put workflow recommendations in for Silo as a package.
Oh, and I found a skinning bug in max 9 tonight where certain verts were weighted as -1#.10. It made skinning some areas an utter chore - Thermidor had a damn good run at it for me. In the end, I discovered that I could fix each of those verts by going to the weight table and shift+right clicking on those -# numbers. This killed them
I dropped the sniper rifle from his back simply because I ran out of time to texture it.
I do like his alpha collar.
I do like the colour choices, which changed recently. I like that his white shirt has contrast between his skin and the jacket, and that I did the same with the legs, shins and feet. Originally the skin was lighter and the shins were dark, and everything got a little lost.
Finally, I did have 2 good excuses for losing time. One is the 29th of March, and the other is the 18th April.
I have a feeling he would have looked nicer without hair though.
The final result is looking cool, but not as cool as it could have.
Well done for finnishing it in time. I didnt even get past concepting.